I sat up today.
I sat up today.
Four physiotherapists came to my room. They started to move me with the determination of putting my feet flat on the floor. They turned me, and for a moment I sat on the bed, with my feet on the floor, staring ahead of me. I have to say, I felt proud and amazed and incredibly dizzy.
When I first came to London to work in the theatre, I was a stage manager on a magnificent production Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Every night, seeing the actor trying to untangle himself from his new spiky black limbs, was like witnessing a macabre dance. Little did I know, years later, sitting up straight on the edge of a bed, I would undergo my own personal metamorphosis.
I feel crumpled and uneven. I slump. I used to choose my shirts carefully, in colours I thought suited me, and I moved and swung around the city. But now I can’t even do up my own buttons.
The word vocation comes from the Latin vocatio,“a call, summons”. Here in hospital, where I spend nights and days with nurses and doctors, the word has gained resonance for me. Like many artists, I consider my work not a past time, not an employment or job, but a form of integration in the world of others.
Sometimes at three or four in the morning, when I am my most sleepless, a charming young man comes and sits with me. He wears glasses and of course a mask, and I doubt I’d ever recognise him on the street. Apparently he is a highly trained pianist, and of course he is also a doctor.
He asks me whether I think he should become a professional pianist, or whether he should remain as a medical practitioner. This is a question I cannot answer, but since I have nothing but time available to me, it’s something I can help him explore.
There are many interpreters of the classical repertoire, but for me, as an artist, one should try and make something new every day, something one has never done before.
So I said to him, every morning if he has time, when he is practising, if he could make a sound that came from himself that was new, he might begin to find a new self. This sounded frightening to him. I said fear is the engine of art, the engine of conversation and love. You may be afraid of saying something, but you can never anticipate how the other will receive it.
From what I could see of his face, he looked a bit anxious, and I wondered at that moment whether I had given him something, after all he had given me as a doctor.
I grew up in a mixed British-Indian household, and as a child I spent a lot of time listening to people speaking in a language I didn’t understand, Urdu or Punjabi, mixed with cockney English. Not understanding Italian is frustrating, but I try to ask very simple and straightforward questions like, “When did you know you wanted to be a nurse or a doctor?” or “When was the moment you realised you fell in love?”
I find in these trying circumstances that the naïve questions are the ones that cut through. I ask one nurse how she found her vocation. She said to me, a nurse came to her mother’s house when she was a child of seven years old and saved her mum, and at that moment the woman realised she had to work in medicine.
I decided to become a writer when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I never thought I’d be good at anything else, and sometimes I wonder whether having chosen so early excluded me from too many other things.
I could perhaps of become a barber, an architect, or Chancellor of the Exchequer. But a writer I am, and sitting here again in this dreary room for another week, like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is speak, but I can also listen.
I can hold up my right hand a little. I can’t close or open my fingers. My hands are inert, stiff and swollen, and they could just as well belong to someone else. These experiences are terrible, but I am beginning to see they are not so unusual.
My devoted son Carlo has been posting these notes on the internet every day, and this is the one thing, apart from the love of the wife, that keeps me alive and gives me meaning, because so many people read these rather sad if not rambling pieces, and they respond to me. So at least something of my vocation is intact.
I wouldn’t advice having an accident like mine, but I would say that lying completely inert and silent in a drab room on the outskirts of Rome, without much distraction, is certainly good for creativity. Deprived of newspapers, music, and all the rest of it, you will find yourself becoming very imaginative.
Recently I felt myself slowing down as a writer, as one does as one gets older, but the ideas have not stopped coming. Characters, voices, situations, I’m as full of them as ever, if not more. So, a four-day break, with absolutely nothing in your life to distract you, might be a good form of shock therapy for a stuck writer. In fact, there probably are no stuck writers, just resting ones, and those who wait.
My friend Salman Rushdie, one of the bravest men I know, a man who has stood up to the most evil form of Islamofascism, writes to me every single day, encouraging patience. He should know. He gives me courage.
That’s all folks for today. The only good thing to be said for paralysis is that you don’t have to move to shit and piss.
Have a big drink on me. Until tomorrow dear friends, in this shitty world, all my love.
Hanif.
I SAT UP TODAY
hanif, bill vincent put me onto your blog, and i started to read it. i have pancreatic cancer, and am dealing with this condition in ways that remind me a lot of what you've just be writing, like seeing through the window and seeing the world out there. it reminds me of camus's l'etranger, where meursault, condemned to death, looks up at the sky and says its enough to see the clouds passing. i felt that way the other day with the bright sun finally shining through here in michigan. you will be coming back to yourself over time, i feel sure, meanwhile i am glad to be a bit in touch with you, old friend, and especially to read your thoughts and words.
Dear Hanif
I love this post. What you had to say to the young doctor-pianist is so inspiring. I was a scientist before I turned to writing, and after I finish this comment, I'm going to print up these words from your post and put them by my desk:
"There are many interpreters of the classical repertoire, but for me, as an artist, one should try and make something new every day, something one has never done before.
So I said to him, every morning if he has time, when he is practising, if he could make a sound that came from himself that was new, he might begin to find a new self. This sounded frightening to him. I said fear is the engine of art, the engine of conversation and love. You may be afraid of saying something, but you can never anticipate how the other will receive it."
Thank you, from this drab Amsterdam winter's day, to you in Rome. Hoping for your continued improvement and recovery.